How to meet the threat of Extinction

V. N. Drabu

A community is recognized as a distinct cultural
group by the life style it maintains through the ages. Whatever the level of its
progress, it is known by the language or dialect it speeeks, the common
traditions it shares and the way it reacts to social environment around it.
There are instances of numerous communities which, with fluctuations in their
political and economic fortunes, have preserved the basic structure of a
distinctive social personality, the ideas and beliefs which differentiate them
from other particular groups. The Sakas, the Parthians, the Yuechis, the
Kushanas, the Mings, the Shans, the Magyars etc., in their transition from a
tribal stage, maintained their distinctive characteristics as a community and
made rich contribution to art and literature, absorbing and assimilating what
ever came their way. In such a process the Indo-Greeks and the Indo-Bactrians
passed on a rich legacy to their posterity in the form of Greek art and
mythology, the impact of which is also quite discernible in the art and
architecture of Kashmir.

Perhaps the most illustrative example would be that of the jews who in the
course of thousands of years of persecution, have succeeded in keeping the basic
structure of their community in peace. Their diaspora has steeled their will and
determination to maintain an untarnished image of their community. They have
preserved their straight forwardness and honest approach to work, confident of
their service record to their community and the will to maintain their
individuality. They have revived their lost heritage and reinstated Hebrew as
the language of their ancestors in the land they could reclaim only after a
protracted and agonying struggle of centuries of sacrifice and suffering. They
have a history, a tradition, a heritage worth emulation by others who have
suffered a similar fate under varying historical circumstances. The few adapted
themselves to changing social environment and have admirably succeeded in being
the same specific persons or things. His individuality is recognized all over be
he an American patron or his erstwhile German persecutor. His achievement has
come in moments of adversity and gloom. The history of a Kashmiri Pandit is no
less romantic. A sage of perpetual persecution and discrimination that he has
suffered through the centuries like the jews who suffered the atrocitis, being
subjected to "genocide" of an unparalled magnitude in human history.
He has maintained the cultural heritage of his ancestors under most trying
circumstances. For how otherwise are we to account for the rich legacy he has
left for us in the form of fine arts literature, music, art, architecture,
religion and philosophy; an assessment of which is beyond the perview of this
paper. Our immediate concern being how best to preserve what we have lost
through the forced exodus and the threat of ethnic cleansing under the brute
might of theo-fascist forces aligned with the ugly fundamentalist monsters, out
to demolish and destroy our very existence and the very fabric of a civilised
society. The threat is real and not imaginary; the consequences are alarming. A
whole community is held to ransom by the terrorists. The very individuality of a
Kashmiri Pandit is at stake. Were this trauma to continue for a decade or two
more, we may be totally lost in a sea of oblivion. We have to rise and face the
scourge of terrorism with fortitude and courage. There can be no place for
complacency or negligence. No soft options can pay. We have to devise a careful
strategy of resistance and survival like the jews.

Imagine a situation where you are asked to develop a region as your homeland
for the displaced persons of your community. What will you do? With your given
infastructure and availability of people, you would naturally work closely with
doctors, teachers, engineers and make their expertise more handy. You are not in
an isolation camp. Unless you connect people and places to important cultural
centres around, you will lose. When you are entering into joint ventures, you
need a common channel of communication, so that all of you feel at home. This is
true of all communities sedentary or moving. A Bengali, a Punjabi, a Tamil,
would of course, converse in their mother tongue even while engaged in their
manufacturing or information technology or travelling abroad. Whatever their
area of specialisation, a background of their mother-tongue surely helps in
their background of physics, chemistry or engineering. All the university
education, when applied to practical training, would definitely look to the
comunication problem to make its application effective and result-oriented. Be
it the science of transmitting data, hi-tech entreprenial ventures, you are
vertually using your own mother tongue which links you to all areas of work. The
importance of ones' mother tongue thus cannot be underestimated. Mentally and
emotionally too, the use of a honoured dialect or language affects the quality
of life and that of the work too. No one can dispute the utility or confidence
that your own mother tongue can thus generate.

But being the "glamour junkees" that some of our women
pretend to be, the message that they receive from the cultured elite is that it
is not attractive, to have your own dialect as a medium of communication with
your own children or members of the family that constitutes a small social
group. In fact, thousands of our women are spending a serious amount of time and
money to cultivate the use of a non-Kashmiri dialect at home and in other social
circles, considering it as the badge of high-breds. They little realize that
they have not been able to coin a sufficiently rich vocabulary to replace the
names and labels associated with their cultural milieu of , for instance "thal
barun" (to have a plate of rice filled with flowers and other
auspicious symbols for the coming spring), "Zangtrai" (get
together of women on this date), "hora ashtami" (the eighth day
of cleaning for Sivaratri), "Vanavun" (chanting of mantras for
the marriage), "Kaw punims" a day dedicated to crows on full
moon-day), "mas muchrun" (preparing the birds for marriage),
"rinda" (the darling), "madan" (the beloved),
etc.

These are still retained as emergency tokens for certain rituals which, with
the passage of time may either get lost or be totally forgotten as the
components of our rich culture. How unrealistic it looks to continue a borrowed
idiom with words and roots bearing an altogether different connotation. However,
when "looking good" we really look ridiculous in a dialect we are
gradually immitating without knowing its essence and the background. Over
exercising and fretting about an idiom not our own, can take quite a battering.
Just imagine the super-ways look, beloved to the catwalk, is possible if a woman
totally abandons her life-style. By disowning our dialect we take to a dialect
we scarsely understand with all its metaphorc similies and slang. We fail to
express the indepth feelings of our heart.

A small community of Sikhs, at home and abroad, continues to maintain its
identity and holds on to its language dialect. This reflects its urge for its
identity despite the poor arithmetic of its numbers scattered in isolated
pockets. Unfortunately, the diaspora of the Kashmiri Pandits has created a
perplexing situation for its sympathizers and critics who find it difficult to
pass an educated and sound judgement. Hounded out from their hearth and homes,
huddled in most unhygienic camps, deprived of a dignified living, the Kashmiri
Pandit has tenaciously held on to its cultural moorings. Not surprisingly, the
critical inhospitable terrain and hostile environment has thrown a challenge the
magnitude of which baffles everyone. And still at the centre of this rugged
landscape, the Kashmiri Pandit has demonstated his will to survive; looks for
beauty and symmetry, for qualities of vision and redemption. The blacker the
situation, the deeper the background of despair. Despite so many odds, the
Kashmiri Pandit constitutes an adhesive ethnic group. His continuing love with
the Himalayan skies and landscapes has aroused in him the deep and intense urge
to rehabilitate his places of pilgrimage and the legends associated with them.
But what is most essential to impart meaning to his traditions and the past has
been taken from them through his rich past, is to restore their memories and
recover what has been taken from there through his rich Kashmiri mother-tongue.
Though there are just too many gaps caused by a life of poverty and
displacement, concrete measures could be taken to maintain the community
character of the Pandits in exile.

Banished from his land of birth and indignantly critical of the dubious laws
of the state to 'restore him to his place of birth with honour and dignity', the
first and the foremost need of the hour is to plan the construction of colonies
on a large scale through our own resources and the largesse received from
abroad. This would undeniably fill in the "placeless void" of a
community deprived of its history and identity. It could be just a sincere
effort to write themselves back into history, to preserve traditions when the
past cannot be remembered. What would make them feel very close, or to whom I
would like to feel myself close, but also too close is the proximity like to
such centres and periodic contacts. Discounted by its own history, a K P would
seek to imfatuate himself through a heightened sense of geography. And the
foothills of the panoramic Himalayas in various sectors could be an ideal choice
for their settlement and rehebilitation.

But the question that remains is how to stave off or prevent the chaos
arising from the dispersal of a microscopic community that commands no vote bank
or political mileage. Caught dispersed in an alien soil (with no geographical
similarity between the Alpine land and the plains below) he finds himself a
stranger between two seemingly dissimilar cultures, though rooted in a common
Vedic and Agamic base. The Expressive Dilemma that may be seen in the context of
the post-exodus movement, is so poignantly illustrated from "what
next":

Nothing to be done

Undoubtedly the urgent reminder is how best to preserve our culture and
tradition. Or what is it, that recovers what has been taken from us. We have to
dismantle our long-standing taboos of puerile class-formation and revive our
heritage through our own Kashmiri idioms. Then and then alone can we obtain an
insight into our rich culture and enter the realm of a Krishan Joo Razdan, a
Paramanand, a Lalleswari, the legendary world of Nagirai and Heemal, an Arnimal
and converse with them in a meanigful way. The same holds equally good about our
music, dance and poetry. The more we distance ourselves from them and our
well-established mores, the more alienated we are and lose the claim to a
distinct identity. This, however does not imply compartmentalization or an
exclusive approach to the modernistic trends. Assimilation and absorption of new
thought currents and advances in science and technology have always been our
rational approach to life. And that is what has kept the vibrant community
alive. What is needed is both adaptation and adoption for the growth of a
healthy social organisation. Clearly if we look for universality and liberal
humanism, our idiom has to reflect a rapidly changing world of scientific
adventure and international understanding. Bridges of understanding and shared
common suffering could be built up by a plethora of scholars who have so far
produced thought provoking articles on the Dilemma of Our Exodus but done little
to arouse the human conscience against the attempted genocide of a whole
community. Very few dramas or theatrical concerts have been organised to draw
the attention of the world community to a man-made tragedy and the menace of a
theo-fascist order no less disastrous and awesome than the Nazi and Fascist
ideology against which mankind had to organize itself to save humanity.

In the all-pervading gloom that envelops us, what better way of statement can
there be than the following "Vakh" of Lalleshwari.

"How can a person understand the agony of others with their bodies and
minds afflicted by deep sorrow! Everywhere I was welcomed with stones and
scarcely could I find any soul to solace me."

Using the metaphor of a cotton flower, Lalla conveys her spiritual experience
in a very subtle way :

Expressing her different stages (bhumikas) in her ascent of the self, Lalla
says :

'Like a cotton-flower, the seeds wherof are separated by the constant
friction of a rotating wheel (and then assume the shape of cotton at the hands
of a cannatantri (dhuniya), Lalla, likewise bore the beatings
courageously before she was transformed into a slender thread to be mounted on
the spining (Khari), wheel of a weaver to take the form of a finely woven
fabric.

Rich in wit and humour, metaphor and imagery, Kashmiri has a very old
etymological base in Vedic lore and bears a deep impact of Paisachi. The
enchanting land of Saptarisis (Seven Sages) and their language has to be
promoted as the vehicle of our day-to-day existence to mirror our feelings of
joy and sorrow, to reverberate the mournful tunes of a community in exile under
sunless skies and kindle hopes for a bright future where all may live under the
common bonds of love and amity. Kashmiri is the symbol of that Divine Mother
whose worship in the form of Math was at one time so pervasive into the
heartland of the Himalayas and in whose lap a Kashmiri found his abode of peace
and beauty.

Kashmiri Overseas Association, Inc. (KOA) is a 501c(3) non-profit, tax-exempt socio-cultural organization registered in Maryland, USA. Its purpose is to protect, preserve, and promote Kashmiri ethnic and socio-cultural heritage, to promote and celebrate festivals, and to provide financial assistance to the needy and deserving.